Crittenton, Young Await NBA Draft

June 27, 2007

ATLANTA – Former Georgia Tech players Javaris Crittenton and Thaddeus Young entered their names in the draft in May and are consensus projections to be selected in the first round. The NBA pre-draft camp and their respective workouts for various teams now over, the two Yellow Jackets wait to find out which teams will selected them Thursday night.

Television coverage of the draft will be on ESPN beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern time.

Georgia Tech was ranked No. 7 on a list of top NBA-producing colleges and universities by NBADraft.net, based on a survey of the past 10 drafts in which the Yellow Jackets have seen Stephon Marbury, Matt Harpring, Dion Glover, Jason Collier, Chris Bosh and Jarrett Jack selected in the first round. All but Glover and Collier, who passed away from a heart attack last off-season, remain active.

“Two freshmen, Thaddeus Young and Javaris Crittenton, are quickly rising up draft boards, and … they both have the potential to shoot Georgia Tech into the Top 5 of this list,” wrote Kevin Duffy in a story for the website published June 23. Connecticut, Arizona, Duke, Wake Forest, North Carolina and Kansas ranked 1 through 6 on the list. Michigan State, Kentucky and Syracuse were listed 8 through 10.

Tech wide receiver Calvin Johnson was selected second overall by the Detroit Lions in this year’s NFL draft, and catcher Matt Wieters was the fifth overall pick in the Major League Baseball draft. If Crittenton and Young go in the first round as projected, it would give the Yellow Jackets first-round draft choices in three major sports in the same year for the first time ever. Only five schools in the past 25 years have produced top 20 draft choices in football baseball and basketball in the same year, and only Texas has done that since 1995.

Lottery picks: Chris Bosh was the sixth lottery pick (one of the top 14 players chosen) from Georgia Tech since the lottery was implemented in 1985. The others were: John Salley (11th overall to Detroit, 1985), Tom Hammonds (9th overall to Washington in 1989), Scott, Anderson and Marbury.

First-round picks: Jarrett Jack was the 14th Tech player taken in the first round overall in 2005 (Denver, traded to Portland), the most recent Yellow Jacket taken in the first round. Georgia Tech has had 12 players taken in the first round since 1989, and seven since 1995.

Multiple players taken in the same draft: It has happened eight times, first in 1965 (Jim Caldwell, 3rd round, L.A. Lakers; Ron Scharf, 15th round, Cincinnati Royals) and most recently in 1996 (Marbury, 1st round, Milwaukee; Drew Barry, 2nd round, Seattle). Tech has never had more than two players taken in the same draft, however, and Crittenton and Young would be the first Tech teammates ever taken in the first round of the same draft.

Early NBA entries: Crittenton and Young are the seventh and eighth Tech players to make an early entry into the NBA draft. The other early entries were Scott (1990), Anderson (1991), Marbury (1996), Glover (1998), Bosh (2003) and Jack (2005). Bosh, Jack and Marbury remain active in the league.